Poetry live from Quintana roo

[es] At a time when poetry readership is dwindling in the United States, poets across the western hemisphere go on writing and publishing in projects like this new one from the Mexican state of Quintana Roo: Contramarea, an online anthology. Edited and introduced by poet David Anuar, Contramarea (Countertide) offers poems in Spanish by five other Quintana Roo poets—four of them born in the 1990s.

José Antonio Iñiguez travels through existential space in the interlocking lines of “Itinerary”:

I cross the avenue Juárez

to enter directly into memory

I cross memory….

In addition to the thirteen poems by these younger poets, the anthology includes, as a tribute, four poems by a fifth poet, Adriana Cupul Itzá , who died in 2005 at the age of 26. Her poems trace a thread linking the fate of human and non-human nature across time as in “Words from a dry tree”—

One day we will write on human skin

the history of the cedar tree….

The poets’ brief biographies offer a glimpse into the complex weave of regional and literary life in Mexico ­– journals, poetry laboratories, fanzines, prizes, book fairs, festivals, classes. Contramarea is an example of the way the internet has expanded that literary space.